When you ask a question about an open-source product, ask the community,
not one specific person. When you ask for one person to answer the
question, then other people who may know the answer, might not help (in
fact they almost never will, assuming you had some reason to want to
know the answer from this one specific person). I've been doing this for
many years. People almost never want to hear this, so I usually just
ignore the questions, even if they have easy answers, because I want a
community to develop, one where people help each other. That's the only
way it can grow. And I want that kind of growth even more than I want
you to get over this particular hurdle.

On the other hand, if you see a newbie ask a question of someone
specific, and you know the answer, and you are not the person he or she
asked, go ahead and answer it. Assume the person just wants the answer,
not really from anyone in particular. If they complain that your name
isn't Linus or Brian or Alice, you can tell them that's true, but the
answer is still the right one.

The Inevitable, Eventual, Free Linux Desk/Laptop

Will Linux reach mainstream desktops and laptops without a major vendor
making the push? Several vendors have recently stepped up to answer that
question.

At CES in January 2006, Google cofounder Larry Page made a public show of
his company's support (sans details) for MIT's $100 laptop, designed to
“revolutionize how we educate the world's children”.

At the end of January, Red Hat announced support for the project as
well. At the time of this writing, the company is working on adapting Fedora and
plans to make the project an open and public one. The company also
signed on as a platinum supporter of the Desktop Linux Summit, an event
Linspire launched three years ago and still runs.

The New York Times also reported that Nicolas Negroponte, who is running
the $100 laptop project, is close to lining up $700 million from seven
countries—China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Egypt and
Nigeria—interested in buying 7 million of the units. A Taiwanese
manufacturer was also reportedly lined up.

Meanwhile, Nat Friedman showed off Novell's Linux Desktop 10 in Paris.
He played videos and MP3 music files (with Banshee, Novell's own player,
using licensed patents), downloaded pictures from a digital camera and
exchanged photos with an iPod. He also showed off XGL, an open-source
graphics subsystem. Right now, it's on track to be available by the time
you read this.

And, of course, the noncommercial open-source projects—GNOME, KDE,
freedesktop.org (freedesktop.org) and so
on—continue to move
forward.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

The Raw Driver, used to gain direct access to unbuffered I/O on block
devices, has been deprecated for a long time, now that the open() system
call supports the O_DIRECT option to provide the same functionality.
Adrian
Bunk has been orchestrating the deprecation and removal process, only to hit
a snag at the final moment. As is usually the case with unwanted user-facing
kernel features, simply removing them tends to present a dilemma: either
users must find an alternative to that feature, or they must no longer
upgrade their kernel. Such situations usually result in the feature
remaining in the kernel while a grass-roots effort is made to clean up
user space. In the current case with the Raw Driver, it turns out that many
users still depend upon it, although a lot of them are making efforts to
migrate to O_DIRECT as quickly as possible. But with such widespread use,
it's also likely the Raw Driver will have to be kept in the kernel for a
long time to come.

Adrian also has been continuing his work to remove all OSS sound drivers
from the kernel, but it is slow going. There are still approximately 50 OSS
drivers to deal with. Some are for hardware that is fully supported by
ALSA, and so those can be removed safely. Others have incomplete or broken ALSA
equivalents that need to be fixed, and some have no ALSA versions at all.
Adrian has been very diligent over a long period of time, tracking down
driver authors and bugs, working with users to identify missing ALSA
features and making sure that only truly obsolete OSS drivers are removed
and not any that actually are still needed.

An old ATI RADEON framebuffer driver, not updated since 2002 and long since
obviated by a newer driver, has been patched out of the kernel by
Michael
Hanselmann. Although the old driver has been marked as old for a long time, the
replacement is not perfect either. In particular, David S. Miller has
pointed out a bug in the screen blanking routing that can confuse the X
Window System under some conditions. But even David favors Michael's patch, as do other
big-time kernel hackers like Benjamin
Herrenschmidt, so it does seem as
though the old driver will be removed before too long. However, Andrew Morton
also has said that if possible, he would “prefer to avoid any
userland breakage”
when removing the older driver.

Jeff Garzik has published the hardware specifications of two previously
closed SATA controller chips, Silicon Image's
3114 and 3124 chipsets.
Silicon Image graciously gave Jeff permission to publish these docs,
presumably after much private discussion. This new documentation also
may encourage support for NCQ (Native Command Queuing), used in
high-performance data transfer. This kind of openness must be appreciated in
a hardware company. It's important to remember that a lot of hardware
remains completely undocumented to the free software community, requiring
much effort in reverse engineering or else the abandonment of support for a
given product entirely.

Although Wim Van Sebroeck has been
maintaining the Watchdog drivers for
a while now, he has just agreed to add himself to the MAINTAINERS file.
Kumar Gala recently asked on the kernel mailing list about tracking down the
Watchdog maintainer, and Arnd Bergmann was the one to suggest that
Wim add himself to the file.

Kernel configuration is always under scrutiny for ways to simplify and
clarify the myriad available options. Recently, Randy Dunlap hit on the idea
of migrating SATA configuration out of the SCSI area entirely. SATA does
depend on SCSI to provide a function library, but that library could be
implemented anywhere, without being tied to SCSI. As Randy reasoned it,
there was no reason for users to have to understand this esoteric
relationship between Serial ATA and SCSI. And apparently, although Randy
himself is not yet interested in seeing this change accepted into the
kernel, the idea seems to have general support among kernel developers, and
it probably would be accepted if Randy submitted a version that satisfied
him.

Have Fon

In early February 2006, the Spain-based company FON (en.fon.com) was three-months old and had just 3,000
“Foneros” when founder Martin
Varsavsky announced a $21.7 million investment from Skype, Google and
Sequoia Capital.

If all those companies have their way, everybody in a position to use or
deploy Wi-Fi Net connections will be a breed of “Fonero”. Varavsky
explains, “To us, the world is divided into Linus, Bills and Aliens. A
Linus shares his/her bandwidth for free with other Foneros, Bills share
their bandwidth for a small fee, and Aliens don't share their bandwidth
at all.” Because Aliens are those creatures called customers.

And those needn't be just geeks like the readers of Linux Journal. Ethan
Zuckerman, in his blog My Heart's in Accra (www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=363), explains why
he's both a Fonero and on
the company's advisory board:

There's a philosophical bias to many of these projects—a belief
that Internet access is an inalienable right and should be
free—that I find charming, but totally impractical for the parts of the
world I'm most concerned about.

In Africa, bandwidth isn't cheap. Entire universities run on less
bandwidth than I have coming into my house on a DSL line. Being
altruistic and leaving your wireless access point open in Africa is
pretty much a guarantee that you're going to end up with other users
abusing the limited bandwidth you have. It's important that African
users have the opportunity to share their bandwidth in a way that
allows for “bandwidth shaping”—sharing some bandwidth with other
users and retaining the rest for your own needs—and billing, so
other users can share the cost with you. FON's current software
isn't optimized for this situation yet, but it's close, and FON is
engaged with the issues in a serious and sustained way. I predict
that FON is something I'll be able to pitch enthusiastically to
African friends in the very near future.

To run FON, download software based on Sebastian Gostchall's DD-WRT
open-source project (www.dd-wrt.org). And, you run it on a FON-compatible
router. Right now, that's a Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL (versions 1x to 4x),
which are the ones with Linux inside. The first 3,000 are being sold far
below cost. Those may be gone by the time you read this, but the company
is sure to make it as easy as possible to become a Linus, if not a Bill.

Invention Is the Mother of Necessity

Krugle is a new search engine just for source code and other technical
stuff. Ken Krugler, company founder and CTO, puts the appeal in simple
terms, “Krugle is a search engine for programmers.”

I was at a conference in San José when Krugle CEO Steve Larsen showed
the beta version of Krugle to Bill Weinberg, an old friend who now works
as an Open Software Architecture Specialist at OSDL. “I have to have
this”, Bill said. Then, when Steve Larsen continued with the demo, Bill
added, “No, you don't understand. I need this.”

Linux Consultants Survey

For the past six months or so, Ken Hess has been conducting an on-line
Linux Consultants Survey to gather consultants' opinions on Linux, both
its current state and its future. Now, he's sharing the results of that
survey with linuxjournal.com readers (www.linuxjournal.com/article/8873). Based on their
customers' experiences, find out what Linux pros are saying about Linux
in the data center, as a server and on the desktop.

It seems as though every branch of government spends countless hours and
money on its voting system—collecting ballots, counting ballots,
recounting, recounting and recounting—and we the people still can't
trust the results. Clearly, closed and proprietary systems aren't
working, so why not extend democracy to the voting system itself and
make it open source? In “The Politics of Honest Voting” (www.linuxjournal.com/article/8872),
LJ
Publisher Phil Hughes outlines what an open-source voting system might
look like. Share your thoughts on the matter, and get involved with
turning the current system on its head.